I have known this novel since 1950, when it was first published in the United States, and I have read it probably once every two years, perhaps even oftener. This makes a total of about sixteen rereadings, and there are few other novels of which I can say this. Perhaps I ought to be ashamed of my partiality, since The Disenchanted is not generally considered to be as important as, say, The Sun Also Rises, which I have read some six times, and The Great Gatsby, which I have read only twice, though I saw the movie, the three movies rather. I have been longing for The Disenchanted to be filmed, and have heard periodically of attempts to raise money for its filming. Neither the Hemingway nor the Fitzgerald novel I have mentioned was adequately translated to the screen, but The Disenchanted is cinematic because it is about the cinema, and it has as hero a fine tragic figure whom any actor would give his eye-teeth to play. Next to The Last Tycoon, there is no other novel I know of which deals so authoritatively with the Hollywood of the nineteen-thirties. Budd Schulberg, who published part of his autobiography fairly recently, was born into the world of the cinema, and he tells us what it was like. His father was one of the great producers, successful but highly literate (only the film profession can admit that disjunction), and the young Budd knew the great actors as adoptive uncles and aunts. He also knew the techniques of the studios as a highly impressionable boy standing on the touchlines. He became an expert writer for the cinema himself: On The Waterfront and The Harder They Fall are his, to say nothing of A Face in the Crowd. But The Disenchanted has not yet achieved what could be regarded as a natural transition from print to celluloid, or whatever is used nowadays.
The Disenchanted is based, not too closely, on what happened to the author of The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon when, sick though on remission from alcoholism, financially ruined because of his own past improvidence and the high hospital fees exacted for the very sick Zelda, he took work in Hollywood. Schulberg has not yet told us the biographical truth about the last days of Scott Fitzgerald as seen from his own youthful angle, and it is doubtful if he will ever need to. The fictional end of Manley Halliday in The Disenchanted is too fine a myth to be unscrambled into what is known as historical truth. Schulberg, like the Shep of his novel, was assigned to work with Scott Fitzgerald on a piece of kitsch called Love and Ice or something like it, and their collaboration was both tragic and farcical. It cried out for the mythicisation which The Disenchanted gives us, and the figure of Manley Halliday, both like and unlike Scott Fitzgerald, stands for more than a mere penniless writer past his best ruined by booze and admiration and the failure of his talent. He symbolises an epoch and a philosophy.
Young Shep is given his scenarial assignment while bombs are dropping on Barcelona. He is acutely conscious of the failure of American capitalism and the need for a left-wing regeneration of a doomed society. Like any decent young man, he is politically orientated in everything, though he works in a trade which purveys dreams. At the same time, there is something in his temperament which is drawn to the decadent pragmatism of the nineteen-twenties – an era which not only ended in a great depression but actively, in his view, caused it. The voice of the sybaritic twenties, jazz and bootleg liquor, fast cars, faster women, spendthrift extravagance, is Manley Halliday, who not only recorded the wasteful era but was, in real life, its most notorious representative. Jere, his wife, shiftless, talentless but pretentious, of immense sexual glamour, a wastrel and a destroyer, is contrasted with Shep’s own girlfriend, clean, decent, with the right political ideas and the hygienic prettiness of an epoch of earnest sobriety. The siren voice of the nineteen-twenties, conflicting with the reasonable admonitions of the age of disillusionment, is more seductive than Shep cares to admit. It is the seduction of the irrational, the Dionysian, and the dead and destructive epoch has, Shep hardly dares to admit, more glamour than the grammar of Marxism.
Ironically, the fulfilment of an impossible dream, the assignment to work with the writer he most admires, turns out for Shep to be the confirmation of the destructiveness of the age that writer wrote about. Halliday, long on the wagon, is seduced into drinking again by the decent Shep and his decent girlfriend, who decently want the assignment to be christened in a bottle of Mumm. Back on the booze, Halliday lets his atavistic streak take over. He is sick, unreliable, a grotesque tramp-figure, helpless, a hopeless collaborator, forcing the disgusted Shep into the postures of a nurse. And yet, of course, it is precisely as a nurse that Shep has wanted to see himself, though a nurse to the easy generality of a sick society, not an ageing man who is all too particular and palpable. It is easier for Shep to turn Halliday into the villain of a historical process, blaming him for the mess the world is in. He is very young, but as the story proceeds he becomes older. We leave him at the end with the manuscript of the novel that Halliday has been working on but is doomed now not to finish. Shep, glum but elated, sees how the art of the decadent reactionary Halliday renders all the fine talk about political rehabilitation meaningless. The particular is all that counts, and art is the scrupulous recording of the particular.
Schulberg himself does some scrupulous recording in this book, which is a triumph of double perspective. The author is writing in the era after World War Two and recalling what it was like to be living in the year of Munich. The young man living in the year of Munich yearns to know what it was like to live in the twenties. He does not find out, except through the refracting lens of his favourite novelist, but we find out through the quite remarkable imaginative penetration of the novelist who has created both the novelist and his admirer. True, Schulberg had the facts of Fitzgerald’s life to draw on, as well as the memoirs of an age that produced some of the most astonishing art of all time (though, by all the Marxist rules, it should have produced nothing). But the old stuff of the interludes that lace the narrative is convincing in a way that no mere research could render it. This is what it was like to live like Scott Fitzgerald, or Manley Halliday, and this is the veritable smell of the Paris and the Côte d’Azur of the age of the lost generation. The great Hollywood party given for ‘Strongpaws’ (the stand-in of Rin Tin Tin) is one of the most remarkable of the set pieces of modern fiction, and, with its apocalyptic end in the fire which regenerates the fallen Halliday, it is pure Hollywood-looking-at-Hollywood. But it is also literature.
Budd Schulberg has, for my money, not written enough. His other fiction is hard and rather rough American realism with a moralist, or even propagandist, tinge. The Harder They Fall, which is about the racketeers of professional boxing, hits out in the manner of Upton Sinclair: it disgusts, makes the blood boil, asks us to do something about clearing up corruption. What Makes Sammy Run is a fascinated and fascinating study of American success in the film world: the talentless young Jew with plenty of push makes it where his betters fail. The volume of stories called A Face in the Crowd is best remembered for another success story – that of the hillbilly singer Lonesome Rhodes, who ends up as a political manipulator and very nearly turns into Big Brother – which became a fine film under the volume-title. These works, entertaining and powerful as they are, are not quite literature. There is little sense of the possibilities of language and imagery in them. By taking as his protagonist a master of language, Schulberg was forced into the development of a style which is sometimes distinguished and always assured. Scott Fitzgerald had, as The Crack-Up shows, the capacity to stand outside himself and make coldly elegant evaluations of a crumbling personality. He would have seen himself in The Disenchanted and approved of the way he is shown. No cruelty and no sentimentality, only hard and well-shaped exactitude.
The final test of a novelist’s achievement is how far he is able to modify the sensibility of his readers. He has certainly modified mine, who sees all ice carnivals as imitations of the climactic one presented here, and finds in many film producers the pretensions of Victor Milgrim (who used to be ‘an omnipotent reader’). Finally, the character of Manley Halliday, broken, tragi-comic but still devoted to art and art only, stands as a permanent symbol of the American writer, whose greatest enemy is early success. He is a three-dimensional creation who will haunt the imaginations of all who have the good fortune to be coming for the first time to this remarkable novel.
Anthony Burgess, 1983